Christmas? No thanks!

Call me, Scrooge because I am no fan of Christmas. Sure, I enjoy seeing the square decked out in beautiful lights, and I love Michael Bublé’s Xmas album as much as the next 20-year old white chick. However, I don’t care for the modern incarnation of this wintry holiday.

For as long as I’ve been alive, Christmas has been rooted in consumerism. Starting as early as October, commercials and advertisements sound off endlessly about holiday deals and gifts for your family or SO. Of course, everyone enjoys exchanging gifts, myself included, but when that serves as the ultimate purpose of the holiday, we have a problem.

Christmas isn’t about consumption; au contraire, it’s about generosity, camaraderie, and gratitude. And, if you’re religious, you should be celebrating the miraculous birth of JC Himself.

Whenever I express my misgivings, certain folks always tell me that Thanksgiving is the proper time to express gratitude, whereas Christmas is merely an attempt to infuse joy into Winter’s dark days.

Um, no.

One can and should express gratitude every single day, and as the origins of Thanksgiving and Christmas are completely different, it simply does not make sense to think that appreciation during the former also covers the bases of the latter.

One does not have to be religious to realize that Christmas should transcend base materialism. Unfortunately, however, it does not. As I see it, Christmas has become a holiday of greed, expectation, and want. And when these crude sentiments are left unfulfilled, resentment and anger proliferate.

Of course, it is possible to purchase and receive gifts without succumbing to the materialist mindset of which I speak. Unfortunately, however, this ability is becoming all the more rare.

As such, I don’t tend to enjoy Christmas. I always like my gifts and I am thankful for my family’ company, but the excessive consumerism and materialism of December often render me without much hope for the future of the holiday. If possession is considered the ultimate objective, where does one go after he obtains what he desires?